Archives for May 2015

We’ve all been there — we’re talking about our upcoming projects, discussing possible timelines and resource allocations, working to align our tactical work with the company and product strategy, when it hits you like a brick thrown through your living room window in the middle of the latest Game of Thrones episode:

So, where’s the project plan?

And that’s where it goes downhill. Because we all know that what’s usually meant by “project plan” is some extremely detailed, well-defined, cascading graphic from hell known as the Gantt chart. It’s been the go-to standard for project management and project planning for decades.

And it needs to die. A miserable, screaming, Melisandre-putting-it-on-the-fire-for-the Lord-of-Light death.

One of the common challenges that Product Managers have in advocating for more agile product definition and development practices is a rather ironic one — those in power and authority often feel that iteration “doesn’t work” because they feel that once something is “done” it won’t ever be revisited. The irony here is that it’s the very people with the direct authority to make sure that things are revisited and revised who make this objection. And it comes from a very true place — in traditional product approaches, you built something and then moved on. And in a randomized environment without a coherent strategy, it’s often the case that iterations do in fact never get revisited.

This, however, is not a failure of the process but rather of the surrounding business culture and the people who hold positions of power, authority, and influence. Overcoming this objection is one of the major achievements that a Product Manager can have in moving from traditional, waterfall-oriented product approaches and toward a customer-centric, agile approach.

With Agile development and Lean practices so popular nowadays, sometimes the history behind these practices and philosophies is overlooked or skipped over entirely. Unfortunately, when people miss the underpinnings upon which these concepts are based, they also tend to distort and remake those principles into something that only barely resembles the original concepts behind them.

Most of what we consider to be modern “Agile” and “Lean” approaches to product design, development, and implementation all stem from a variety of manufacturing principles that coalesced into the Toyota Production System in the late 1940s. This process was a vast departure from the Western approach to production lines — the interchangeable parts an always-moving production line, in which people were just another cog in the wheel. Rather, the TPS system focused on several principles designed to implement systemic processes to allow people to provide feedback into the work being done and how it might be improved. The development of these principles, and their application in the “Toyota” way slowly built between the 40s into the 70s, where it became more broadly adopted under the guise of “just-in-time manufacturing.”

Many books have been written on the TPS process (with all apologies to Office Space fans), and I would encourage people interested in the history to do some research — but for this article I wanted to focus on what the TPS system views as “waste” and how each is specifically defined, because when we talk about Agile and Lean trying to eliminate “waste”, we probably really mean one of these three things:

Muda = “Waste” or failures of people or processes to efficiently deliver product.

I’ve invited my old friend and former co-worker Molly Lindblom to provide some content on the Clever PM blog; Molly is an exceptional product strategist, and was instrumental in the success that I had creating the LexisNexis Market Intelligence product so many years ago. My experiences working on that product have informed much of what I’ve done since — so, without further ado…

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to include a guest post on the Clever PM! I’ve been an avid reader for a long time and am looking forward to sharing some of my experiences as the founder and principal of my business growth consultancy Business Transformations. To kick things off, I’d like to share my experience as an assistant brand manager for Dial who (unknowingly) went to war with Proctor & Gamble.

Consumer product positioning is a tricky thing: a lot of companies have been selling products in different categories for a very long time, and have built strong market strategies based on a significant understanding of their customer needs. So at the tail end of my new product planning for Dial Dishwashing Liquid, imagine how excited I was thinking that I had a product that would clean up on the competition.

In prior articles, I discussed how one could apply the principles of Newton’s First and Second Laws of motion to their duties as a Product Manager. Here, we close the series by examining Newton’s Third Law — that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The fact is, this law applies as much to social interactions and leading through influence as it does to interactions in the physical world.

The Third Law basically states that when one thing exerts force on another, the object of that force exerts the same amount of force in return — when sitting in a chair, for example, our bodies exert downward force on the chair, and the chair exerts upward force on us, reaching a point of equilibrium that we call “sitting”. Similarly, when you are working with people and attempting to exert some level of influence to move a project forward, you are likely to encounter an equal and opposite exertion of force back upon you.

A common perception of Product Managers within organizations is that we’re somewhat of a “know-it-all” — which is not always the most productive position from which to do our jobs. Some of this perception is earned — simply a function of the broad base of knowledge, influence, and direction that we are so often assigned. Some of this perception is biased — because we often have to make decisions based on limited information, people who disagree with those decisions will blame what they perceive to be incompetence and over-reaching.

There are many things that we can use as Product Managers to fight these perceptions — but the single biggest such weapon in our arsenal here is knowing the things that we don’t know or that we’re not confidently competent at, and ensuring that we’re actively seeking to bolster those aspects of our jobs with the support and advice of people that we and the organization trust to provide good guidance.

In a prior installment, I discussed how the concepts of Newton’s First Law of Motion might be understood and adapted to the world of Product Management. Since writing that piece, I thought it would be interesting to create similar pieces for the other two Laws that Newton originally expounded. While this sounds kind of easy — and it is for the First and Third laws — the Second Law was troubling me for a bit.

Then it hit me — in Product Management, we’re constantly working to push forward new ideas, and to ensure that the current plans fit with the state of the world, the market, and of our customers. And we’re always doing so from a place of influence rather than authority.

So, if you look at it from that perspective, nearly everything that we do is a matter of force, which under Newton’s Second Law is the product of mass and acceleration…